I had to wait to see her when I got there, she was a busy woman, but I was given a home-design magazine in English. I was also given a thimble of coffee in a tiny porcelain cup. There was a chocolate perched on the side of the saucer and I was pointed into a chair that seemed to take me in its polished arms and set me straight. The magazine, for some reason, featured a series of close-up photographs of people’s feet on tiptoe, taken from behind. In all the photos the feet were poised directly above some delicate thing, their heels only just touching it. One heel hovered over an orange, another over a lime. There were several shots of heels with eggs underneath them. They were all curves and soft shadows, and I found my eyes drifting over them and thinking, in the quiet of the office, away from E, from B, where no one needed me right away, that it might be possible to prefer one sort of thing over another. Even small things, that it might be possible to consider: orange, or lime, or egg. It might be possible to think quietly of things like that, to make up my mind. The coffee was hot, and sweet in just the right way and I slipped the chocolate whole between my teeth.

Once we moved into the apartment, I kept the children out of the empty room. Perhaps it was for me: a little place. B slept in a small collapsible crib in the living room. Or that was the idea, for him to sleep there, but he was the sort of baby that preferred to cling to its mother at night and be walked and walked and walked and talked to. So mostly that’s what we did, at night, walk in circles. Living room, entryway, kitchen, living room. Here we are, I whispered to him over and over and over again, my lips pressed against his snail-shell ear.

Sometimes, after he finally, finally, fell asleep I crept into the spare room and lay on the floor and called my mother. The signal ringing out of my midnight or one or two in the morning into her middle of the day. She was always eating lunch and would talk to me as she chewed and I would listen and sometimes fall asleep. The daylight always amazed me when she answered, even though it was only science, the most usual thing, to see her tiny and far away, wrapped in sunlight, blazing. There was always so much light, when I called her, there at the end of my wrist.

We had arrived in Switzerland pushing suitcases packed tight with the few things we’d decided to keep. The rest, the furniture, the silverware, the wedding plates with the bamboo pattern painted in seafoam green I’d spent such a long time picking out, had been given to friends or sold to strangers back home. Even B’s crib. Even the rug beneath the crib.